The Catholic Crisis

Ross Douthat has written perhaps the most important Catholic book in the era of Pope Francis, which began in 2013. To Change the Church is thoughtful, penetrating, and graced with an ironic touch and gentle humor. It is also terribly difficult for a faithful Catholic to review, as it is acutely critical of the pope. A disclaimer, then: Pope Francis is a holy man, for Catholics his teaching authority is infallible, and nothing contained here should be taken for filial impiety or disloyalty.

Yet as Douthat notes, the principal duty of a Catholic isn’t to the pope but “to the truth the papacy exists to preach, to preserve, and to defend.” There is reason to worry that lately a spirit of relativism has entered the Roman Church that threatens to undermine its unity and catholicity. That should concern Catholics and non-Catholics, because the Church is the living bedrock of the West and one of the last bastions of the principle that moral truth is moral truth yesterday, today, a thousand years from now.

To Change the Church

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That the Church is in the throes of some sort of crisis is apparent even—Douthat would say especially—to non-Catholics and the secular media. Lately not a week goes by without some news breaking from the Vatican that jarringly calls into question the stability of Church dogmas.

The latest was an Italian journalist’s claim that the pope had told him that hell doesn’t exist. The journalist, Eugenio Scalfari, is 93 and known for impressionistic reportage; not for him are the recorders and notebooks that most reporters use to ensure the accuracy of quotations. The Holy See Press Office rushed to clarify that the purported remarks were not “a faithful transcription.” It is true that Francis has repeatedly reaffirmed Church teaching on hell and the devil. The question is why he continues to grant interviews to the atheist reporter; the “hell” interview was Scalfari’s fifth with the vicar of Christ in as many years.

For Douthat, the Scalfari interviews are typical of a papacy that thrives in ambiguity. The aim, he says, is to “keep the church together” even as Francis pursues a project of deep liberalization. The author devotes most of the book to exploring the origins of this project and then weighs its merits, prospects, and meaning at a moment of worldwide ideological ferment. The verdict: The Francis way of change is sharpening the Church’s internal antagonisms, radicalizing the conservative opposition, and undoing the great promise of his pontificate.

Douthat, best known for his columns in the New York Times, begins by sketching three histories of the past 50 years in Church life. First, he takes up the view of liberal Catholics, those who saw the Vatican II reforms first promulgated in 1965 as God’s invitation to remake the Church in the image of liberal modernity. The council, liberals hoped, would dismantle male-dominated hierarchy, shelve Latin liturgy, and do away with moral precepts about divorce, contraception, and homosexuality that ignored the “lived experience” of the faithful in the 20th century.

There was some progress in this direction in the decade after the council. But then came the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, from 1978 to 2013, long years that, in the eyes of the liberals, saw Rome betray the conciliar commitment to a broad, modern, “bottom-up” Catholicism. John Paul–era conservative Catholics begged to differ, and Douthat next takes up their view. They believed that the council had implemented essential reforms—embracing freedom of conscience and denouncing anti-Semitism, above all—but that Vatican II didn’t authorize the disruptive changes pressed by its most ardent fans. The results of those disruptions were, to the conservative mind, empty pews, collapsing vocations, and a flight from Catholic truth and beauty. That is, until John Paul reversed the worst of these trends, quashed heterodoxy, and helped defeat Soviet Communism along the way.

I subscribe to this second account, and so does Douthat mostly, though he finally tries to present a balanced third story. It goes like this: The conservative camp was right to warn of “dissolution and decline” under the liberal model. But too often the conservatives were stuck in a defensive lurch. Their reaction sufficed to halt the drift toward liberal Protestantism. Yet they couldn’t rout theological liberalism for good—not least because Vatican II texts were vague enough to accommodate liberal dreams—and the Church remained mired in its post-conciliar squabbles by the time Benedict abdicated in February 2013.

Enter Francis. The first Jesuit to take the office, he vowed to look beyond the old divide. As he told the conclave that elected him, “the self-referential Church keeps Jesus Christ within herself,” and it was time for the Church “to come out of herself.” Conservatives and liberals both heard things they liked in these words. The hope was that the Argentine pontiff would end the Vatican II wars. Five years later, however, the ecclesial culture war is more heated, more bitter, and more parlous than it ever was under John Paul or Benedict.

What happened?

It turns out that “outreach” under Francis entailed a frontal assault on conservatives. True, the pope also inveighed against a “Gnostic” form of purely private religion that sounded a lot like liberal Catholicism. But he reserved his harshest words for a supposedly “rigorist,” “legalistic,” “elitist” faith steeped in Latin ritual. Young people attracted by the splendor of the Latin Mass were “rigid.” Priests who preferred traditional vestments and regalia were effeminate. To his right, Francis saw only scribes and Pharisees.

Never mind that, as Douthat notes, conservative Catholics are largely powerless in the wider culture, while the liberals have the support of the “entire mainstream post-1960s culture.” Never mind, too, that it is conservatives who have sustained Catholic parishes and vocations in many parts of the world. No matter. Popes are allowed to part ways with their predecessors in style and emphasis. And some, though by no means all, Catholics on the traditionalist end of the spectrum could be cranky and prone to weird politics, a phenomenon that long predated the Francis papacy.

Conservatives could shrug off these insults and still cheer many things about the pope. He was (and remains) rock-solid on abortion and other dignity-of-life questions. He was (and remains) a withering critic of gender ideology and the transgender agenda. And his critique of the “throwaway culture” of capitalism was in deep continuity with Catholic social teaching.

But then came the “marriage problem,” as Douthat calls it, the controversy that has consumed the Francis papacy and plunged the Church into what may be its most serious theological crisis since the Reformation.

Douthat does yeoman’s work untangling the debate, which goes to the heart of Catholic beliefs about morality, papal authority, and Jesus himself. The question is whether remarried Catholics may receive holy communion. For two millennia, the Church answered no, based on Jesus’s clear teaching that marriage is a divine sacrament and therefore indissoluble. Rome had preferred to lose England than give in to Henry VIII over this very issue.

But in 2014, the liberal German cardinal Walter Kasper laid out his proposal, long blocked under John Paul and Benedict, to create a “penitential path” for the divorced and remarried that would allow them to be admitted to communion. He did so at a meeting of cardinals—and at the invitation of the pope. Kasper insisted that his suggestion wouldn’t change the Church’s position on divorce. The point, he said, was to find a solution for those among the divorced and remarried who are in tough or complex situations and could use a pastoral path back to the altar.

The cardinal’s protests notwithstanding, this meant radical change. The Church’s obstinacy on divorce, Douthat argues, is “a study in what makes Catholicism’s claim to a unique authority seem plausible.” Yes, in practice, many remarried Catholics receive communion. But the failure to uphold a principle is no argument against it. If the Church adopted Kasper’s view, it would in effect imply that Christ’s words had been unclear, that for two millennia Rome had been under a misapprehension. Kasper’s proposal would also telegraph that the moral law is too hard to follow in some cases, a view that the Church has consistently opposed: “God does not command what is impossible,” said Saint Augustine. Worst, it would stretch papal authority to the breaking point, since Francis would be going against his immediate predecessors.

Now, to be clear, Pope Francis has never formally endorsed communion for the divorced and remarried. What he has done is issue a long apostolic exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), with a single ambiguous footnote that could be interpreted as authorizing communion for the remarried in a narrow set of cases. The narrowness and ambiguity gave conservatives hope that the more revolutionary interpretations could be, well, interpreted away.

The pope didn’t stop there, alas. He has used a number of non-magisterial forums—not least interviews with the aforementioned Signore Scalfari—to suggest that he intends to go the whole hog with Kasper. When conservative cardinals posed a series of dubia, or queries, asking him point-blank whether the prohibition still stands, the pope first ignored and then ridiculed them. Today some bishops interpret Amoris to abrogate the old teaching while others maintain the traditional position, with the disconcerting result that Catholic truth shifts depending on where the faithful live.

The most aggressive liberals are framing the single footnote as Vatican ratification for full-spectrum progressivism. Everything is suddenly up for grabs, from the Church’s rule against artificial contraception to blessing same-sex unions to offering last rites at euthanasia clinics to the veracity of the Gospels. A cadre of social-media-savvy liberal priests, meanwhile, push theology just to the line of heresy, to the glee of the secular press and with the apparent approval of their superiors. Meanwhile, conservative critics of the pope find themselves sidelined and sometimes jobless.

Where will all this lead? Douthat has no definite answers, but he engages in some fascinating speculation. The liberals simply don’t have the numbers. The European heartlands of theological liberalism are in demographic decline, and liberal orders struggle to attract vocations. Church coffers may be full, but the pews are empty. The leading lights of theological liberalism are octogenarians, and there are no successors in the wings.

Conservatives and traditionalists, meanwhile, have the numbers, the intellects, the energy. Orders that prize tradition and orthodoxy are thriving worldwide. In population terms, Africa is a beacon of hope for conservatives, a continent where weekly Mass attendance averages 70 percent (compared with just 20 percent for Europe) and where the Church wins 9 million new believers each year. African Catholicism is pungent and conservative, and African fecundity means that liberal Europeans will soon be outnumbered in the Church. Even so, the conservatives are fast losing their institutional grip, which was never all that tight even under John Paul and Benedict.

The grim upshot, then, is that the Catholic civil war is likely here to stay. More relevant to non-Catholics, it also means that what Douthat describes as the John Paul/Benedict “synthesis” between modernity and tradition might be slipping away. That synthesis more or less made the Catholic peace with liberal democracy, but it also called on liberal democracies to honor their Judeo-Christian roots and safeguard the moral culture that is the precondition for rights-based self-government.

Now some orthodox Catholics are wondering if the two conservative popes conceded too much to liberal order. “If the conservatism of John Paul and Benedict led only to Francis,” they think (in Douthat’s telling), “perhaps it didn’t conserve enough.” At its worst, such pessimism leads conservatives to defend to the hilt every ill-advised and cruel ruling of pre–Vatican II popes—especially if those rulings touched upon the sacramental life of the Church, which they perceive to be under threat from Rome today.

But the desire for ordered continuity can take other forms, and I find myself yearning with Douthat for a new Catholic center, “one that would offer a Christian alternative to the aridity of secularism, the theocratic zeal of Islamism, and the identity politics of right and left.” To my mind, Pope Francis at his best still embodies that center. When he embraces the horribly deformed, when he invites a child with Down syndrome to sit next to him, when he comforts hardened men in prison and reduces them to tears, Francis makes visible the supernatural guarantee on which his office rests. He is Peter, and the gates of Hades will not prevail.

Catholics can and must disagree with the pope when truth is at stake. They don’t have to like every pope. But they cannot afford to doubt the guarantee lest they doubt the Guarantor.

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Chicago, Illinois — Andy has little time to chitchat. There are hundreds of hot towels to sort and fold, and when that’s done, there are yet more to wash and dry. The 41-year-old is one of half a dozen laundry-room workers at Misericordia, a community for people with disabilities in the Windy City. He and his colleagues, all of whom are intellectually disabled and reside on the Misericordia “campus,” know that their work has purpose, and they delight in each task and every busy hour.

In addition to his job at the laundry room, Andy holds two others. “For two days I work at Sacred Heart”—a nearby Catholic school—“and at Target. Target is a store, a big super-store. At Sacred Heart, I sweep floors and tables.”

“Ah, so you’re the janitor there?” I follow up.

“No, no! I just clean. I love working there.”

Andy’s packed schedule is typical for the higher-functioning residents at Misericordia, many of whom juggle multiple jobs. Their work at Misericordia helps meet real community needs—laundry, recycling, gardening, cooking, baking, and so on—while preparing residents for the private labor market. Andy has already found competitive employment (at Target), but many others rely on Misericordia’s own programs to stay active and employed.

Yet if progressive lawmakers and minimum-wage crusaders have their way, many of these opportunities would disappear, along with the Depression-era law which makes them possible.

The law, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, permits employers to pay people with disabilities a specialized wage based on their ability to perform various jobs. It thus encourages the hiring of the disabled while ensuring that they are paid a wage commensurate with their productivity. The law safeguards against abuse by, among other things, requiring employers to regularly review and adjust wages as disabled employees make productivity gains. Many of these employers are nonprofit entities that exist solely to provide meaningful work for the disabled.

Only 20 percent of Americans with disabilities participate in the labor force. The share is even smaller among those with intellectual and developmental disabilities. For this group, work isn’t mainly about money—most of the Misericordia residents are oblivious to how much they get paid—so much as it is about purpose and community. What the disabled seek from work is “the feeling of safety, the opportunity to work alongside friends, and an atmosphere of kindness and understanding,” says Scott Mendel, chairman of Together for Choice, which campaigns for freedom of choice for the disabled and their families. (Mendel’s daughter, who has cerebral palsy, lives and works at Misericordia.)

Abstract principles of economic justice, divorced from economic realities and the lived experience of people with disabilities, are a recipe for disaster in this area. Yet that’s the approach taken by too many progressives these days.

Last month, for example, seven Senate progressives led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts wrote a letter to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta denouncing Section 14(c) for setting “low expectations for workers with disabilities” and relegating them to “second-class” status. The senators also took issue with so-called sheltered workshops, like those at Misericordia, which are specifically designed to help the disabled find pathways to market employment. Activists at the state level, meanwhile, continue to press for the abolition of such programs, and they have already succeeded in restricting or limiting them in a number of jurisdictions, most notably in Pennsylvania, where such settings have been all but eliminated.

While there have been a few, notorious cases of 14(c) and sheltered-workshop abuse over the years, existing law provides mechanisms for punishing firms for misconduct. Getting rid of 14(c) and sheltered workshops, however, could potentially leave hundreds of thousands of disabled people unemployed. Activists have yet to explain what it is they expect these newly jobless to do with their time.

Competitive employment simply isn’t an option for many of the most disabled. And even those like Andy, who are employed in the private economy, tend to work at most 20 hours a week at their competitive jobs. What would they do with the rest of their time, if sheltered workshops didn’t exist? Most likely, they would “veg out” in front of a television. Squeezing 14(c) program and forcing private employers to pay minimum wage to workers whose productivity falls far short of the norm wouldn’t improve the lot of the disabled; it would leave them jobless.

Economic reality is reality no less for the disabled.

Nor have progressives accounted for the effects on the lives of the disabled in jurisdictions that have restricted sheltered workshops. “None of these states have done an adequate job of ascertaining whether these actions actually enhanced the quality of life for the individuals affected,” a study in the Social Improvement Journal concluded last year. Less time in sheltered workshops, the study found, “was not replaced with a corollary increase in the use of more integrated forms of employment.” Rather, “these individuals were essentially unemployed, engaging in made-up day activities.”

Make-work is not what Andy and his colleagues are up to today at Misericordia. They complete real tasks, which benefit their fellow residents in concrete ways. “This work is training, but it also gives them meaning,” one Misericordia director told me. “It’s not just doing meaningless work, but it’s going toward something. We’re not setting them up to do something that someone else takes apart. This is something that’s needed.” Yet, in the name of economic justice, progressives are on the verge of depriving men and women like Andy of the dignity of work and the freedom of choice that non-disabled Americans take for granted.

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To paraphrase New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (with apologies), the less Republicans do in office, the more popular they generally become. That is, when the GOP exists solely in voters’ minds as a bulwark against cultural and political liberalism, it can cobble together a winning coalition. Likewise, Democrats regain the national trust when they serve only as an obstacle to Republican objectives. It’s when both parties begin to talk about what they want to do with their power that they get into trouble.

That is an over-simplification, but the core thesis is an astute one. In an age of negative partisanship and without an acute foreign or domestic crisis to focus the national mind, it’s not unreasonable to presume that both parties’ chief value is defined in negative terms by the public. Considering how little of the national dialogue has to do with policy these days, general principles and heuristics are probably how most marginal voters navigate the political environment.

Somewhere along the way, though, Democrats managed to convince themselves that they cannot just be the anti-Donald Trump party. Their most influential members have become convinced that the party needs to articulate a positive agenda beyond a set of vague principles. For the moment, Democrats who merely want to present themselves as unobjectionable alternatives to Trumpism without going into much broader detail appear to be losing the argument.

According to a study of campaign-season advertisements released on Friday by the USA Today Network and conducted by Kantar Media’s Campaign Marketing Analysis Group, Democrats are not leaning into their opposition to Trump. While over 44,000 pro-Trump advertisements from Republican candidates have aired on local broadcast networks, only about 20,000 Democratic ads have highlighted a candidate’s anti-Trump bona fides. “Trump has been mentioned in 27 [percent] of Democratic ads for Congress, overwhelmingly in a negative light,” the study revealed. In the same period during the 2014 midterm election cycle, by contrast, 60 percent of Republican advertisements featured President Barack Obama in a negative light.

There are plenty of caveats that should prevent observers from drawing too many broad conclusions about what this means. First, comparing the political environment in 2018 to 2014 is apples and oranges. Recall that 2014 was Barack Obama’s second midterm election, so naturally enthusiasm among the incumbent party’s base to rally to the president’s defense wanes while the “out-party’s” anxiety over the incumbent president grows. If Donald Trump’s job-approval rating is still anemic in September, it is reasonable to expect that Republican candidates will soft-peddle their support for the president just as Democrats did in 2010. Second, Democrats running against Democrats in a Democratic primary race may not feel the need to emphasize their opposition to the president, since that doesn’t create a stark enough contrast with their opponent.

And yet, the net effect of the primary season is the same. Democrats aren’t just informing voters of their opposition to how Trump and the Republican Party have managed the nation’s affairs; they’re describing what they would do differently. By and large, the Democratic Party’s agenda consists of “doubling” spending on social-welfare programs, education, and infrastructure, and promising a series of five-year-plan prestige projects. But Democratic candidates are also leaning heavily into divisive social issues.

The themes that Democratic ads have embraced so far range from support for new gun-control measures (“f*** the NRA,” was one New Mexico candidate’s message), to protecting public funding for Planned Parenthood, to promoting support for same-sex marriage rights, to attacking Sinclair Broadcasting (which happened to own the network on which that particular ad ran). A number of Democratic candidates are running on their support for a single-payer health-care system, including the progressive candidate in Nebraska’s GOP-leaning 2nd Congressional District who narrowly defeated an establishment-backed former House member this week, putting that seat farther out of the reach of Democrats in November.

In the end, messages like these animate the Democratic Party’s progressive base, but they have the potential to alienate swing voters. That may not be enough to overcome the electorate’s tendency to reward the “out-party” in a president’s first midterm election. And yet, the risk Democrats run by being specific about what they actually want to do with renewed political power cannot be dismissed. Democrats in the activist base are convinced that embracing conflict-ridden identity politics is a moral imperative, and the party’s establishmentarian leaders appear to believe that being anti-Trump is not enough to ensure the party’s success in November. All the while, the Democratic Party’s position in the polls continues to deteriorate.

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A running theme in Jonah Goldberg’s fantastic new book, Suicide of the West, is the extent to which those who were bequeathed the blessings associated with classically liberal capitalist models of governance are cursed with crippling insecurity. Western economic and political advancement has followed a consistently upward trajectory, albeit in fits and starts. Yet, the chief beneficiaries of this unprecedented prosperity seem unaware of that fact. In boom or bust, the verdict of many in the prosperous West remains the same: the capitalist model is flawed and failing.

Capitalism’s detractors are as likely to denounce the exploitative nature of free markets during a downturn as they are to lament the displacement and disorientation that follows when the economy roars. The bottom line is static; only the emphasis changes. Though this tendency is a bipartisan one, capitalism’s skeptics are still more at home on the left. With the lingering effects of the Great Recession all but behind us, the liberal argument against capitalism’s excesses has shifted from mitigating the effects on low-skilled workers to warnings about the pernicious effects of prosperity.

Matthew Stewart’s expansive piece in The Atlantic this month is a valuable addition to the genre. In it, Stewart attacks the rise of a permanent aristocracy resulting from the plague of “income inequality,” but his argument is not a recitation of the Democratic Party’s 2012 election themes. It isn’t just the mythic “1 percent,” (or, in the author’s estimation, the “top 0.1 percent”) but the top 9.9 percent that has not only accrued unearned benefits from capitalist society but has fixed the system to ensure that those benefits are hereditary.

Stewart laments the rise of a new Gilded Age in America, which is anecdotally exemplified by his own comfort and prosperity—a spoil he appears to view as plunder stolen from the blue-collar service providers he regularly patronizes. You see, he is a member of a new aristocracy, which leverages its economic and social capital to wall itself off from the rest of the world and preserves its influence. He and those like him have “mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children.” This corruption and Stewart’s insecurity is, he contends, a product of consumerism. “The traditional story of economic growth in America has been one of arriving, building, inviting friends, and building some more,” Stewart wrote. “The story we’re writing looks more like one of slamming doors shut behind us and slowly suffocating under a mass of commercial-grade kitchen appliances.”

Though he diverges from the kind of scientistic Marxism reanimated by Thomas Piketty, Stewart nevertheless appeals to some familiar Soviet-style dialectical materialism. “Inequality necessarily entrenches itself through other, nonfinancial, intrinsically invidious forms of wealth and power,” he wrote. “We use these other forms of capital to project our advantages into life itself.” In this way, Stewart can have it all. The privilege enjoyed by the aristocracy is a symptom of Western capitalism’s sickness, but so, too, are the advantages bestowed on the underprivileged. Affirmative action programs in schools, for example, function in part to “indulge rich people in the belief that their college is open to all on the basis of merit.”

It goes on like this for another 13,000 words and, thus, has the strategic advantage of being impervious to a comprehensive rebuttal outside of a book. Stewart does make some valuable observations about entrenched interests, noxious rent-seekers, and the perils of empowering the state to pick economic winners and losers. Where his argument runs aground is his claim that meritocracy in America is an illusion. Capitalism is, he says, a brutal zero-sum game in which true advancement is rendered unattainable by unseen forces is a foundational plank of the liberal American ethos. This is not new. Not new at all.

Much of Stewart’s thesis can be found in a 2004 report in The Economist, which alleges that the American upper-middle-class has created a set of “sticky” conditions that preserve their status and result in what Teddy Roosevelt warned could become an American version of a “hereditary aristocracy.” In 2013, the American economist Joseph Stiglitz warned that the American dream is dead, and the notion that the United States is a place of opportunity is a myth. “Since capitalism required losers, the myth of the melting pot was necessary to promote the belief in individual mobility through hard work and competition,” read a line from a 1973 edition of a National Council for the Social Studies-issued handbook for teachers. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which for some reason produces a curriculum for teachers, has long recommended that educators advise students poverty is a result of systemic factors and not individual choices. Even today, a cottage industry has arisen around the notion that Western largess is decadence, that meritocracy is a myth, and that arguments to the contrary are acts of subversion.

The belief that American meritocracy is a myth persists despite wildly dynamic conditions on the ground. As the Brookings Institution noted, 60 percent of employed black women in 1940 worked as household servants, compared with just 2.2 percent today. In between 1940 and 1970, “black men cut the income gap by about a third,” wrote Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom in 1998. The black professional class, ranging from doctors to university lecturers, exploded in the latter half of the 20th Century, as did African-American home ownership and life expectancy rates. The African-American story is not unique. The average American income in 1990 was just $23,730 annually. Today, it’s $58,700—a figure that well outpaces inflation and that outstrips most of the developed world. The American middle-class is doing just fine, but that experience has not come at the expense of Americans at or near the poverty line. As the economic recovery began to take hold in 2014, poverty rates declined precipitously across the board, though that effect was more keenly felt by minority groups which recovered at faster rates than their white counterparts.

As National Review’s Max Bloom pointed out last year, 13 of the world’s top 25 universities and 21 of the world’s 50 largest universities are located in America. The United States attracts substantial foreign investment, inflating America’s much-misunderstood trade deficit. The influx of foreign immigrants and legal permanent residents streaming into America looking to take advantage of its meritocratic system rivals or exceeds immigration rates at the turn of the 20th Century. You could be forgiven for concluding that American meritocracy is self-evident to all who have not been informed of the general liberal consensus. Indeed, according to an October 2016 essay in The Atlantic by Victor Tan Chen, the United States so “fetishizes” meritocracy that it has become “exhausting” and ultimately “harmful” to its “egalitarian ideals.”

Stewart is not wrong that there has been a notable decline in economic mobility in this decade. That condition is attributable to many factors, ranging from the collapse of the mortgage market to the erosion of the nuclear family among lower-to middle-class Americans (a charge supported by none-too-conservative venues like the New York Times and the Brookings Institution). But Mr. Stewart will surely rejoice in the discovery that downward economic mobility is alive and well among the upper class. National Review’s Kevin Williamson observed in March of this year that the Forbes billionaires list includes remarkably few heirs to old money. “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inherited wealth accounts for about 15 percent of the assets of the wealthiest Americans,” he wrote. Moreover, that list is not static; it churns, and that churn is reflective of America’s economic dynamism. In 2017, for example, “hedge fund managers have been displaced over the last two years not only by technology billionaires but by a fish stick king, meat processor, vodka distiller, ice tea brewer and hair care products peddler.”

There is plenty to be said in favor of America’s efforts to achieve meritocracy, imperfect as those efforts may be. But so few seem to be touting them, preferring instead to peddle the idea that the ideal of success in America is a hollow simulacrum designed to fool its citizens into toiling toward no discernable end. Stewart’s piece is a fine addition to a saturated marketplace in which consumers are desperate to reward purveyors of bad news. Here’s to his success.

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We try, we really do try, to sort through the increasingly problematic “Russian collusion” narrative and establish a timeline of sorts—and figure out what’s real and what’s nonsense. Do we succeed? Give a listen.

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On July 4, 1863, Rabbi Sabato Morais of Philadelphia’s Mikveh Israel congregation ascended the pulpit to deliver the Sabbath sermon. Those assembled in the synagogue knew that over the previous few days, Union and Confederate forces had been engaged in an epic engagement at Gettysburg, but they had no idea who had won or whether Confederate forces would continue onward to Washington or Philadelphia. That year, July 4 coincided with the 17th of Tammuz, when Jews commemorate the Roman breach of the walls of Jerusalem. Morais prayed that God not allow Jerusalem’s fate to befall the American capital and assured his audience that he had not forgotten the joyous date on which he spoke: “I am not indifferent, my dear friends, to the event, which, four score and seven years ago, brought to this new world light and joy.”

An immigrant from Italy, Morais had taught himself English utilizing the King James Bible. Few Americans spoke in this manner, including Abraham Lincoln. Three days later, the president himself reflected before an audience: “How long ago is it?—eighty-odd years—since on the Fourth of July for the first time in the history of the world a nation by its representatives assembled and declared as a self-evident truth that ‘all men are created equal.’” Only several months later, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, would Lincoln refer to the birth of our nation in Morais’s manner, making “four score and seven years ago” one of the most famous phrases in the English language and thereby endowing his address with a prophetic tenor and scriptural quality.

This has led historians, including Jonathan Sarna and Marc Saperstein, to suggest that Lincoln may have read Morais’s sermon, which had been widely circulated. Whether or not this was so, the Gettysburg address parallels Morais’s remarks in that it, too, joins mourning for the fallen with a recognition of American independence, allowing those who had died to define our appreciation for the day that our “forefathers brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty.” Lincoln’s words stressed that a nation must always link civic celebration of its independence with the lives given on its behalf. Visiting the cemetery at Gettysburg, he argued, requires us to dedicate ourselves to the unfinished work that “they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.” He went on: “From these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion,” thereby ensuring that “these dead shall not have died in vain.”

The literary link between Morais’s recalling of Jerusalem and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address makes it all the more striking that it is the Jews of today’s Judea who make manifest the lessons of Lincoln’s words. Just as the battle of Gettysburg concluded on July 3, Israelis hold their Memorial Day commemorations on the day before their Independence Day celebrations.On the morning of the Fourth of Iyar, a siren sounds throughout the land, with all pausing their everyday activities in reverent memory of those who had died. There are few more stunning images of Israel today than those of highways on which thousands of cars grind to a halt, all travelers standing at the roadside, and all heads bowing in commemoration. Throughout the day, cemeteries are visited by the family members of those lost. Only in the evening does the somber Yom Hazikaron give way to the joy of the Fifth of Iyar’s Yom Ha’atzmaut, Independence Day.For anyone who has experienced it, the two days define each other. Those assembled in Israel’s cemeteries facing the unbearable loss of loved ones do so in the knowledge that it is the sacrifice of their beloved family members that make the next day’s celebration of independence possible. And the celebration of independence is begun with the acknowledgement by millions of citizens that those who lie in those cemeteries, who gave “their last full measure of devotion,” obligate the living to ensure that the dead did not die in vain.

The American version of Memorial Day, like the Gettysburg Address itself, began as a means of decorating and honoring the graves of Civil War dead. It is unconnected to the Fourth of July, which takes place five weeks later. Both holidays are observed by many (though not all) Americans as escapes from work, and too few ponder the link between the sacrifice of American dead and the freedom that we the living enjoy. There is thus no denying that the Israelis’ insistence on linking their Independence Day celebration with their Memorial Day is not only more appropriate; it is more American, a truer fulfillment of Lincoln’s message at Gettysburg.

In studying the Hebrew calendar of 1776, I was struck by the fact that the original Fourth of July, like that of 1863, fell on the 17th of Tammuz. It is, perhaps, another reminder that Gettysburg and America’s birth must always be joined in our minds, and linked in our civic observance. It is, of course, beyond unlikely that Memorial Day will be moved to adjoin the fourth of July. Yet that should not prevent us from learning from the Israeli example. Imagine if the third of July were dedicated to remembering the battle that concluded on that date.Imagine if “Gettysburg Day” involved a brief moment of commemoration by “us, the living” for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.Imagine if tens—perhaps hundreds—of millions of Americans paused in unison from their leisure activities for a minute or two to reflect on the sacrifice of generations past. Surely our observance of the Independence Day that followed could not fail to be affected; surely the Fourth of July would be marked in a manner more worthy of a great nation.

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